Don't Fear the Reaper
by Monkey Ruler
Summary: Reaper!verse. Bones always hinted that he was older and more jaded than Jim assumed. Jim assumed that he knew everything just by reading Bones' file. But Jim didn't know who Reaper was, and just how old that made Bones.


He thinks this is what being drunk feels like.

He doesn't know if its because he hasn't slept in months, or because he's been drinking for a week straight, but his mind is hazy, the tips of his fingers are tingling, and he feels restless. Maybe his body finally gave him a break for once and let him get right and truly drunk. Lord knows its been so long, he's forgotten what it feels like.

Fast healing doesn't seem worth it when you can't get plastered.

He feels like going for a run.

He decides that yes, he truly is drunk, when as he is running (he can't remember when he started,) the distance he is covering turns into a metaphor of his life. He's been running for awhile, his body on autopilot, not caring where he's going as long as it is somewhere he won't remember, because he know if he thinks about it he'll just go back to Sam, poor Sam, _his own twin, _and if the UAC, immortality, and mercenary work hadn't screwed him up for life, seeing a gravestone where his beautiful smiling sister should be...

Well...

He started running faster.

~!~

When he wakes up, his head is an ache that is slowly fading to the back of his consciousness, and a rifle is staring him in the face. He groans and settles back down in what he finds is a hay stack. He was so tired of threats.

"Who are you and how'd you git here?" The owner of the rifle asks, and he doesn't find himself much in the mood for answering dumb questions.

He opens his eyes again, sees that yes, he _did _pass out in a barn, wasn't that strange, and it is an old man in his late sixties holding the rifle. A scenario rushes through his head; it would take less than a second to knock the rifle out of his arm, surely less time than it would take the old man to react. He still has his dagger in his boot, though he can't tell whether or not he's wearing shoes, but even if he's not there's the familiar feeling of his gun digging into his back, the one that's been the one constant for years since he got back from-

He blinks.

He observes more.

Like the wedding ring on the man's finger. A plain, gold band, worn like a second skin the rest of his finger had gorwn around, probably making it damn near impossible to remove.

The old man's eyes are straight on him, his hands steady, the gun just out of reach, but his finger isn't on the trigger.

Though he passed out in a stranger's barn after a week-long bender, he is a good man, he _has _to be, otherwise he'd be as bloodthirsty and deformed as the rest of his kind, snarling and hungry to _infect, infect, infect_, and good men don't kill good men.

"I'm a homeless drunk." He mumbles, "And I got in through the window."

The man looks at the sole window, closer to the ceiling than the floor. It was believable that the drunk had tumbled down the ladder, made a sizable impression on the dirt from where he fell rather than climbed down, and then scrambled his way over to the stack of hay in the corner of the barn, but to get to the window in the first place he'd have had to have leapt at least ten, fifteen feet up. Why the stranger didn't just break the lock to the door was beyond him, though he was glad he wouldn't have to replace the lock.

"You one of them alien types?" The man asks warily, his rifle slowly lowering, ready to lift again at the slightest provocation.

The stranger lets out a laugh, startling himself that such a noise came out of his mouth, and the old man is a little amused and a little less wary of the stranger. He can probably see how broken he is.

"That would make things less complicated, wouldn't it." He mumbles, and his knees shake as he gets to his feet.

The old man was tall, once, but age lowered him enough that the stranger could look down on him. However, that didn't make the man look any less confident that he could drop the stranger if need be. He liked the confidence the old man had.

The man studied him, his rifle forgotten by now, and his face seemed to soften as he was doing so.

How pathetic did he look?

"Name's David."

The stranger doesn't know what to say that won't startle him. What name should he go by? Grimm? Reaper? Monster?

"I'm no one."

David gives a little chuckle at the brooding mess on his barn floor.

"How 'bout some breakfast, kid?"

~!~

It's the wife that names him, eventually, when he tells them his abridged story and things settle down.

Leonard, she decides, and who was he to deny Eleanora? No one thinks anything of it, David having another set of hands around the house. When he introduces himself as Leonard McCoy, no one raises a fuss. They're getting older, and if their neighbors are suspicious of a boy that no one has ever met before, they don't say anything to the McCoy's about it.

When they send him to the local college, there are a few whispers, but still no one says anything.

When he seduces the local sweetheart, Jocelyn, there's talk. They have to spin up this complicated story, how Leonard really is their son, but they sent him off-planet for schooling, and now he's come back for college, and yes he looks older than college-age. He's in graduate school. There are doubts, but the McCoys are nothing if not stubborn, and Leonard is eventually accepted by the outside world as one of the family.

When he starts temping at a hospital, locally, of course, the town looks at him with pride. Growing up to be just like his father, he is. Almost as if they forgot he wasn't there from the beginning.

When Eleanora passes away in her sleep, Leonard grieves as a real son would. And to Leonard, he grieves just as deeply as he did for his blood family.

David buries himself in his work, Leonard buries himself in his studies, and Jocelyn is his angel. They need her, David and Leonard, to bring them out into the light. When she's around, David remembers how to smile, and Leonard forgets all the bad that has ever happened to him. He forgets his age, and for a second half-believes he's going to grow old with her and raise a whole litter of children with Sam's eyes and Jocelyn's laugh and none of them will know loneliness like the Reaper and everything will be fine.

When he proposes, he doesn't quite know what he's doing. He shouldn't tie himself down like this when already he's lived a lifetime longer than her and will live lifetimes more. But he's doing it anyway, and it's stupid, and he starts planning his early, tragic "death" so he doesn't have to explain why he doesn't age. David would understand.

When Jocelyn gives birth, all of his plans come to a screeching halt. This child has his eyes, his chin, which translates to _Sam's _eyes and _Sam's _chin, and he's damned if he'll let Jocelyn give away Joanna's middle name as an homage to one of her many relatives when Samantha is a perfectly reasonable name.

When Joanna starts growing pretty golden locks, the spitting image of Sammy back when they were kids, Leonard feels guilty comparing the two

When David gets sick, Leonard spends weeks by his side, looking over him, hating himself, and spending half of his time resisting the liquor cabinet and the rest of his time not faking his suicide and running.

When he gives in to David's pleading and assists him to his deathbed, everything goes to shit.

Everything is taken from him

Jocelyn, Joanna, his job, all of it flies away as if it was all a dream, and when the cure for David's illness appears just weeks after his funeral, Leonard considers it a nightmare.

~!~

Pike approaches him in a bar, and apparently Leonard has made quite a name for himself in this lifetime, because the man tries to recruit him. Leonard eventually reasons that it's better than stumbling around in bars waiting to pass out in another barn, and if Pike's stupid enough to want the Reaper in the federation, then Leonard's stupid enough to oblige him. It's a bit of a gamble—he's never been important enough for anyone to double check his falsified records. But what else is there to do?

It doesn't take him long to sober up, what with his freak healing, and he realizes in his drunken stupor he managed to run all the way up to fucking Iowa just so he wouldn't have to visit the same bar twice. But it was so lonely when he was sober, and when he was drunk he always felt like running. So he crossed a couple state lines in the process.

He set off his journey to the Riverside Shipyard with a full flask and an itch to _get away. _He wasn't joining the federation to make friends, just to occupy his time before he could _get the fuck over it _and move on from being a McCoy. Rude, buzzed, and not looking forward to space travel, considering the last time he went he died, came back to life, then killed his commanding officer.

He's in the bathroom for a good fifteen minutes forgetting who he is before he's found. It starts as a knock, firm but polite, three in quick succession, and it eventually grows in urgency until the woman who was politely calling him 'sir' before now has a bitter emphasis on the word every time she addresses him, and he knows that the words 'asshole' are flitting through her mind every time he argues back.

Because he's _not _hiding. He just doesn't want to see people, windows, light, noise, space, or anything at all. He has decided that he hates everything. He hates the uniforms, he hates the crowd, he hates that he only has the tiny flask in his jacket, he hates how disappointed Eleanor probably is of him, how disappointed Sam is, how ashamed he is of himself, that he doesn't even _deserve _Joanna, with Sam's smile and Sam's eyes and when the woman threatens him to sit down, _before she'll make him sit down, _he sits because he is a good man and good men don't fight humans with his superhuman strength for no reason other than his stupid emotions.

And he was taught better than to hit a lady, no matter how angry and drunk he was.

When he does sit down, he sits next to the only other man in a ship not in regulation reds. The man gives him an odd look, and chances are he thinks Leonard is either batshit crazy or a crazy-ass coward, and he might be a little bit of both. He doesn't care much about what people think of him. He always was an internal brooding thing, even when he was just John Grimm, Reaper, kept his opinions to himself and expected others to do the same. But he feels like justifying his madness to the other man, somehow, and starts ranting about all the various ways one could die on the way to San Francisco. But his wife slips in through the cracks somehow, _ex-wife_, and with that and the mention of alcohol they are friends. They spend the rest of the trip drinking, laughing, the prettyboy with the bruised face telling stories that only had a strand of truth to them, and John responding as gruff and jagged as the broken man felt, the prettyboy _laughing with him _no matter what he said. But alcohol always could make you laugh at everything.

He fully expects that to be the last he sees of prettyboy. He's going to spend a few years improving his xenobiology and learning Federation rules, then get shipped off in some pretty spacecraft working his way up the medical ranks until he's the CMO of some ship. Then he's going to "die" conveniently during shore leave and never be heard from again. Maybe a cliff. Prettyboy was friendly, ambitious, and he had command track written all over him. He would be a captain in ten years, and they were never going to see each other again. Reaper didn't plan on letting Leonard live for another ten years.

When they arrive, he claps the kid on the back and goes off to settle himself in his quarters.

The next day prettyboy is on his doorstep calling him 'Bones' and demanding that the two of them find a food place that didn't have the word 'vegan' in it somewhere.

He tells the kid to fuck off.

The kid doesn't listen to him, and doesn't leave his side for the next three years.

His name is Jim, apparently, James Tiberius Kirk, but Leonard spends most of his time calling him 'Kid'.

The name Bones was already taken.


End file.
